KEY POINTS:
The inquiry into an Auckland murder so brutal the FBI offered to help the police catch the killer culminated yesterday in a minimum 14-year sentence for a North Shore teenager.
Kori Trevithick stabbed 77-year-old Doreen Reed dozens of times after breaking through two locked doors into her Eskdale Rd home in the early hours of January 13.
After searching two bedrooms, he found the elderly widow asleep.
At yesterday's sentencing in the High Court at Auckland, Trevithick's lawyer, Peter Williams, QC, said the teen - 15 at the time - panicked when he encountered Mrs Reed and had never intended to hurt her.
However, he stabbed her 25 times in the subsequent attack, piercing her heart and skull. Several wounds to her arms and hands showed she had tried to fight her attacker off.
"Kori still can't believe he did it. It still just seems like a nightmare," Mr Williams said.
Trevithick was startled and frightened and had blacked out. He could not remember what happened.
He and his family were devastated and he had written two remorseful letters, to the court and Mrs Reed's family.
After the killing, Trevithick drove in Mrs Reed's Rover car to his girlfriend's house and later to his own home. He parked the stolen car 50m away.
His mother took him to the police station believing he had breached a curfew, which was part of his bail on charges of burglary, fraud and unlawfully taking motor vehicles.
At the police station, Trevithick confessed to the brutal slaying and his mother was "shocked and broke down" when she was told he had been arrested for murder.
Mr Williams said the teen's remorse was genuine and he had said in a letter he had wanted to die.
When the Herald published in March the details of Mrs Reed's killing, investigators told the paper the brutality of the killing had prompted Supervisory Special Agent Mark Safarik - a behavioural analysis expert at the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia - to make contact with Auckland police with an offer to help catch the killer.
The offer was never taken up, however, as local police have their own profilers.
The teenager's brother, John Trevithick, said yesterday after the sentencing that the murder had made life very hard.
"I know what he did was wrong, real wrong, but there is nothing we can do, there is nothing anyone can do, to take that back," he said.
"All I hope is that my brother survives this. It is a cruel world in there [in prison]."
As the youngest of four brothers, Kori had always been "such a good boy".
His mother sobbed when details of the murder were disclosed in court but John Trevithick said she was acting "like a normal mother would do finding out her little boy is going to jail - not very nice".
Mary Morgan, a friend of Mrs Reed, said she was reminded of her every day when she saw her house.
"She was a lovely lady, an English lady, very well-to-do and no problems," she said.
"She is in our thoughts every day."
Mrs Morgan said Mrs Reed would have found it hard to comprehend "how a person could do such a thing".
"I just don't know how he could ever have gone in and done such a thing to a human being."
Mrs Morgan said she could not forgive Trevithick for what he had done but she "probably" accepted his remorse.
